Three of My Closest Friends Are People I Have Never Been in a Room With

I have known three people for between eight and twelve years, speak to all of them most weeks, and have met none of them. Two I would call among my closest friends by any measure I can think of, and one of them knows more about a difficult period of my life than my brother does.

I am aware this is a claim that reads differently depending on the reader’s age, and I am not interested in arguing that it is equivalent to friendship in person. It is not equivalent. It is different, and the differences are specific enough to be worth describing.

What text friendship is unusually good at is depth of a particular kind. Writing is slow, and slowness allows precision, and precision about internal states is difficult in speech and easier on a keyboard. I have told these three things I have not said out loud to anyone, and the reason is not distance or safety — it is that I had time to find the sentence. Several of the most useful conversations of my adult life happened over three days in a message thread with gaps in them.

It is also good at continuity. There is no scheduling. Nobody has to be free at the same time, nobody organises anything, and a friendship that requires nothing from a calendar does not decay in the way described in every article about adult friendship. Two of these have survived house moves, a divorce, and a job loss on my side, with no interruption at all, because there was nothing to interrupt.

What it cannot do is presence. When my father was ill, the person who was useful was a friend twenty minutes away who came and sat in my kitchen and did not say much. The three online could not do that, and one of them said so plainly, and there was nothing to be done about it. Text is very good at the conversation about a difficult thing and cannot do the part where somebody is simply there while you are not talking.

The second limitation is narrower and took me longer to see: I know these people through what they choose to write, which is a curated channel even when nobody is curating deliberately. I have never seen any of them tired, or short with a waiter, or in a bad mood they had not decided to describe. That is not deception. It is that the medium only carries what is composed, and a decade of composed communication produces a very complete picture of someone’s interior and a very thin one of how they are in the world.

I would not trade any of the three and I would say to anyone who has friendships like this that they are real and that the people telling you otherwise are usually describing a version of the internet from fifteen years ago. What I would add, from having got it slightly wrong for a while, is not to let them substitute for the local kind, because the two do genuinely different jobs and I spent a couple of years with a rich correspondence and nobody who could come round.